I turned to Lipotin with a questioning look. He was staring after the car, eyebrows raised. His yellow face seemed fixed, like a faded mask from some past century stuck between the leather cap and coat of a twentieth-century motorist.
In mute accord we turned back to the castle courtyard. In the middle we were accosted by the old man with the wild eye.
“Show you the garden,” he whispered, his gaze above our heads, as if he were not looking at us. “Old garden. Beautiful garden. Big. Tend it – lots of work ...” his lips continued to move, but nothing comprehensible emerged.
He led the way and we followed automatically, in silence.
The tour took us through gaps in the masonry and between ramparts, with an occasional stop at flowerbeds or groups of trees. The old man rambled on, telling us when he planted the trees or laid out the beautifully tended beds that suddenly appeared in the middle of rubble and crumbling masonry where glossy lizards were basking in the sun. Without batting an eyelid, he told us he planted some centuries-old yews as tiny seedlings one hard winter; he brought them from “the other side” – he waved his hand vaguely at the distant horizon – for the grave.
I gave a start: “What grave?”
He shook his head and I had to repeat the question often before he understood. He gestured to us. We went up to the dull red trunks: in the middle of the massive yew trees was a small mound, such as you might find in an old park with a moss-grown column or temple on top. There was nothing of the kind on this mound, but it was covered with rose bushes afire with deep red blooms. Behind it was the grey gleam of the outer wall, and a gap in the stonework gave a broad vista to the valley and the silver river.
I had seen the view before; but where?
It is a not uncommon experience. The scene around me suddenly seemed to become familiar; I had seen all this before: the trees, the roses, the gap in the wall, the view of the silver river. It was as if I were returning to where I belonged. At first I thought it was a memory of the images on a coat of arms; then I felt it was the place I saw in John Dee’s glass as the ruin of Mortlake Castle. Perhaps that wasn’t Mortlake at all, I said to myself, perhaps it was this castle that in my vision I took for the home of my ancestors?
The old gardener parted some of the rose bushes and pointed out a hollow covered in moss and ferns. He gave a foolish grin and muttered:
“The grave. Yes, yes, the grave. Down there rests the quiet face with open eyes and outstretched arms. I took the dagger from his hand. Only the dagger, Sir! You must believe me! Only the dagger. – You see, I knew that I had to give it to the beautiful woman, to the kind young woman who is keeping a look-out with me for the Lady.”
I had to hold on to one of the yew trees. I tried to call out to Lipotin, but my tongue would not obey. All I could do was stammer:
“The dagger? – Here? – A grave?”
Suddenly the old man understood me perfectly. He nodded encouragingly and a smile lit up his haggard features. Following a sudden thought, I asked him:
“Tell us, old man: to whom does the castle belong?”
The old man hesitated: “Elsbethstein? Who it belongs to?” He sank back into his old listlessness; his lips moved, but no sound came from them. With a confused nodding of the head, he motioned us to follow him.
A few steps took us to a small gate in the wall concealed behind elderberry bushes and overhung with wild roses. Above the arch of the gate I could see evidence of some crude carving. The ancient gardener pointed at it eagerly. With a half decayed stick I pushed aside the tangle of branches and flowers and saw a moss-covered coat of arms carved above the lintel. It was clearly sixteenth century work and showed a sloping cross; from one of the arms a rose branch grew with three flowers: one in bud, the second half opened, the third in full bloom with one petal about to fall.
For a long time I mused over the mysterious symbols on the coat of arms. The weathered stone, the grey-green tufts of moss, the aura of melancholy which pervaded the carving of the rose with the blooms in three stages of flowering: it all entrapped me in a state between memory and premonition, so that I did not notice that my companions had left me by myself. A dream vision gradually focused in my mind: the burial of my ancestor, John Dee in the magic garden of the adept, Gardner. More and more the outlines of the vision from the past merged with my present surroundings.
As I stood there, full of strange doubts and rubbing my eyes and forehead to clear them of the enchantment, I was startled by an unexpected appearance in the darkness of the entrance: it was Jane, of that there could be no doubt. But her approach was noiseless, hovering and – what could it mean? – she was dripping wet, her light summer dress clung to her body. The expression on her face was fixed and serious, almost frightening, so penetrating was the mute warning her features radiated.
A dead woman projecting her image by telekinesis? – Then I heard the words that seemed to come from her mouth:
“Finished. – Free. – Help yourself! – Be strong!”
“Jane!” I called. For a moment I was overtaken by dizziness and when my senses cleared it was no longer Jane before me but a majestic woman of otherworldly appearance, a crown on her head; her piercing gaze seemed to come from distant centuries and pass through me and go on to some future time of my fulfilment.
“So it is you, Queen and Lady of the Garden ...;” more I could not say.
I stood facing the miraculous woman, eye to eye, indissolubly bound – and a maelstrom of thoughts, insights and furious decisions ricocheted off my external being into a spiritual world, sparking off a turmoil of devastation and upheaval. Then my physical ear caught the sound of Lipotin and the mad gardener returning; my eyes saw the old man start, raise his hands and sink to his knees. His face radiant, he knelt close to where I stood and crying and laughing and sobbing he looked up at the queenly figure and stammered:
“Praise and thanks be, Lady, that you have come. My weary head and my long years of service I lay at your feet. See if I have served you faithfully.”
The vision of womanhood gently inclined her head to the old man. He fell to his face and was silent.
Once more the regal apparition turned to me and I seemed to hear a voice, like a bell ringing from a distant tower:
“Greetings: – Longed for – Chosen – Not yet tested!” and as the echo died away I seemed to hear Jane’s earthly voice return, repeating her anxious warning: “– help yourself. – Be strong.”
Suddenly the vision paled as a noise of uproar came from the courtyard beyond the wall.
I looked up to see Lipotin staring incomprehendingly at myself and the prostrate gardener in turns. A few brief words told me he had seen nothing of the vision. He was merely puzzled by the old man’s strange behaviour.
But before he had time to bend down to him, men rushed towards us from the castle courtyard, shouting. I hurried to meet them. Words battered at my ear like breakers in a storm and a second later my eyes saw: in a shallow spot in the middle of the river – below where the road follows a sharp bend high above a rocky precipice – picked out by the white lines of foam from the current, was the wreck of the Princess’ car.
Slowly the pandemonium around me resolved into words: “All three dead! It seemed to take off into the air, right into the air. The chauffeur must have been out of his mind, or blinded by the devil!” – – “Jane! Jane!” It was my own cry that woke me! I turned to call Lipotin, but he was kneeling next to the gardener who was still lying motionless on the grass. He raised the old man’s head and looked at me with empty, soulless eyes. The old man’s body slipped from his hands onto its side. The old man was dead.
Lipotin continued to stare at me as if in a trance. I was incapable of speech. I just pointed over the parapet down to the river. He stared down into the valley for a long time, then passed his hand lightly over his forehead: “So: sunk into the green depths once more. Steep banks! I am weary ... Did you hear? They are calling me.”
A flotilla of little
boats brought the bodies from the shallow rapids. Only the two women; the chauffeur had been carried away downstream. “Corpses that those waters bear away are never found,” someone said, “they are swept away without coming to the surface until they reach the far-off sea.” I shivered at the thought of seeing the face of my cousin, John Roger, staring up at me from the waters, deathly pale and bloated.
And then the dreadful question: was it an accident? ... And this? What could this mean? Jane’s dagger was lodged deep in the Princess’ breast, piercing her heart.
She must have impaled herself on the spearhead by accident when the car crashed – at least that was what I told myself. I felt almost like a corpse myself as I stood for a long time before the dead women: Jane seemed to be sleeping with an expression of peace and contentment on her face. Her quiet, budding beauty seemed to blossom on the withered stem and dried my tears and turned my lamentation into prayer: “Holy guardian angel of my life, intercede for me that I may bear it all ...”
The Princess’ brow was furrowed. Her lips, closed tight in pain, seemed to repress a cry. It was almost as if she were still alive and about to wake up at any moment. Tiny shadows from the leaves dancing in the breeze flitted across her eyelids. – Or did she suddenly open them and close them again quickly when she saw I might notice. No, no: she is dead! The dagger has pierced her heart!! Then, as the hours passed, the tension in her features relaxed and her face was distorted by a repulsive, cat-like trait.
Since the funeral of the two women I have not seen Lipotin. But I await a visit from him hourly; as we parted at the cemetery gate he said:
“Now it begins in earnest! Now we will see who will be Lord of the Dagger. Put your trust in yourself alone, if you can. – But I will, of course, remain your obedient servant, and when the time is ripe I will come to ask if you have need of me. By the way, the red Dugpa monks have sent me the black spot ... That means ...”
“Oh, yes?” I asked, preoccupied; my whole being was filled with mourning for Jane. “Well?”
“That means ...” Lipotin did not complete the sentence but just drew his hand across his throat.
By the time I had taken in his gesture and asked him what the meaning of it all was, he had disappeared in the crush of people getting on and off a tram.
I often go over in my mind all that he said and did; and still I ask myself: was it real? Or did I just imagine it? These events have a different place in my memory from those that I went through at the same time ...
How long is it now since I buried Jane side by side with Assja Shotokalungin? How can I know? I have not counted the days, nor the weeks, nor the months; – or is it years that have passed since then? The dust lies inches deep on all the papers and objects around me; the windows are clouded over with dirt and that is all to the good: I have no desire to know whether I am in the town of my birth, or whether I have become John Dee in Mortlake, caught like a fly in time’s web. Sometimes I have the strange idea that I died long ago and am lying in my grave alongside the two women without being aware of it. How can I prove to myself that this is not the case? There is a mirror on the wall and from its dull glass a face stares out at me that could be me, a face with a long beard and tangled hair, but perhaps the dead can see themselves in the mirror and imagine they are still living? For all we know, they may think of the living as dead!? – No, I have no proof that I really am still alive. If, with a great effort, I force my mind back to the time when I stood at the grave of the two women, then I seem to remember that I came straight back here to my house and dismissed all my servants and wrote to my old housekeeper, who was still on holiday, that she should not return and I made arrangements with my bank to pay her a pension. – Maybe it is all a dream; maybe I am dead and my house is empty.
One thing is certain: all my clocks have stopped, one at half past nine, another at twelve o’clock, and others at times I have not even bothered to note. And spider’s webs are everywhere, everywhere. The spiders have come in their thousands; where can they all have come from in such a short time, say a hundred years? Or is it only one year in the life of men outside? What do I care? What is it to me?
What have I lived on in all this time? The question seems worth pursuing. Perhaps if I could answer it I would know whether I am dead or not! I think back and, like a memory of a dream, I see myself slipping through the quiet streets of the town at night, eating in ale-houses and low taverns and running into friends and acquaintances who spoke to me. Whether I replied and what I replied, I could not say. I think I walked past them without a word so as not to reawaken my sense of loss at Jane’s death. – Yes, that must be it: I have slipped unnoticed into the realm of death, into a lonely realm. But what do I care whether I am alive or dead?
I wonder whether Lipotin is dead? – There I go again. It makes no difference whether one is alive or dead.
One thing I am sure of: since the burial Lipotin has not come to me, in any shape or form. Otherwise the picture I have of him would not be the last one in my memory: he disappeared in a crowd outside the cemetery after he had said something about the Tibetan Dugpas which I have forgotten. He drew his hand across his throat. Or was that at Elsbethstein? – – What do I care? Perhaps he has gone back to the East and turned back into John Dee’s Mascee, the Tutor to the Czar. Since then I have departed this world, so to speak. I do not know which is farther, Asia or the land of dreams where I have taken refuge. Perhaps I have only half woken up and my study looks to me as if the world outside my window had dreamed away a hundred years.
All at once I am gripped by a feeling of unease: I see my house as a nut, eaten away on the inside and covered in dusty mould, in which I sleep on like a mindless grub that has missed its transformation into a moth. What has caused this unease? A sudden memory torments me: was that not the shrill sound of a bell? In the house? No, not in the house! Who would ring the bell of a deserted house? It must have been a ringing in my ears. I have read somewhere that hearing is the first sense to waken when a person in suspended animation returns to life. And then I remember – and admit it openly to myself – I have been waiting, waiting, waiting, for how long I do not know, for the return of my dead Jane. In the nights and days I crawled around the house from room to room, praying on my knees to heaven for a sign from her, praying and praying until I lost all sense of the passage of time.
There is no object that used to belong to my beloved Jane that I have not made into a fetish, that I have not prayed to, pleaded with to help me compel Jane to come down to me, to call her back from the grave, to send her to me to save me from the pain of loss that hangs above my neck like an executioner’s axe. But it was all in vain; I have not seen nor even felt the presence of Jane, I who have been her lawful wedded husband for three hundred years.
Jane has not come ... but Assja Shotokalungin has! Now that I have awoken from my lethargy – as it now seems to me – and forgetfulness, I know: Assja Shotokalungin is here, has always been here ...
At first she came through the door and I knew straightaway that there was no point in locking the door. How should a simple door-key keep out one whom the grave cannot hold?
Now that I think back to my feelings when she first came I cannot hide the fact that her visit was welcome to me. I will confess my guilt – o thou eternal face that hath watched me night and day since these dreams began, thou double face with the crystal above, shining so that my eyes hurt whenever I dare to return thy glance, I will confess this guilt before thee and before myself. My one excuse is that I thought Assja was Jane’s messenger from the kingdom of the dead. I was a fool to believe she would bring me tidings of love, tidings for the soul ...
Assja visits me daily. Now that memory has returned I have to acknowledge that fact. She no longer comes through the door; she simply appears.
Usually she sits on the chair at my desk and – my God, how pointless it is to try to conceal the truth from myself – she always comes in the same dress of black and silver; it has a flowing, w
avy design – the Chinese symbol of eternity – which is the same as the decoration on the Russian Tula-ware box.
My eyes are attracted towards the dress of the dead Princess, all the time, and my lustful gaze seems to wear it away so that it has gradually become older and more and more transparent. It sits more and more loosely on her body, the weave becoming sketchier, gradually falling to pieces, until now the Princess – or rather the Thracian Goddess Isaïs – is gleaming in all her naked beauty on the chair before me.
All the time I have concentrated my gaze on the decay of her dress. At least that is what I tell myself. Perhaps I wished it away! Or am I not deceiving myself after all? It could be so, for I know that not a word of passion has been spoken.
Have we talked to each other at all? No! What could I have said in the face of this slow uncovering of the Princess?!
And I call on thee, thou awful, double-faced guardian of my dreams, Baphomet, be thou my witness before God: did impure desire fill my thoughts or was it not rather a time of amazement, of hate-filled curiosity, and of the will to do battle? Have I ceased to call upon Jane, my saint, for aid against the emissary of Black Isaïs, the companion of Bartlett Greene, the destroyer of John Roger and of my own blood-line?
But the more fervently I called upon Jane, the more swiftly, the more surely did Assja come, triumphant, glowing in the beauty of her golden-brown flesh. She came – – she still comes ...
Did Lipotin not prophesy this? Prophesy that the struggle was only just beginning?
I am prepared; I am armed. But I do not know when the battle began. It began imperceptibly at a time that I have now forgotten. I do not know the manner of the struggle nor how it is to be won. The first attack that I must make fills me with apprehension, for I am afraid of stabbing the empty air and losing my balance. I am filled with dread at the thought of the days spent sitting opposite each other in silence, locked in a psychokinetic struggle. .
The Angel of the West Window Page 37